Recently I came across a statement that a developer went back to Ruby on Rails from the Crystal ecosystem. The reason: missing Hotwire support. And honestly, I get it!
I'm a huge fan of the Hotwire utilities - you can write normal server code without too many frontend dependencies. In fact, Turbo brings SPA feeling out of the box!
I've been developing apps with Marten for a while. And all of them have had Hotwire built in. I've built a turbo extension for it quite a while ago, but the experience was never the same as with Rails. So I very much understand the statement to go back to Rails. Everything works out of the box!
Well, how should anyone know that there's already effort to bring better Hotwire support to the Crystal ecosystem, if nobody writes about it? So here it is! In this post I'll walk you through building a task app with Marten using the full Hotwire stack — Turbo Frames, Turbo Streams, and Stimulus. And beyond what's already available in marten-turbo, I'm currently working on importmap and Stimulus integration support, which is coming along nicely. I want to show you where things stand today.
Initializing the task app
